GSU Lecture

James Bond is a hero with many faces, all at once a realistic character firmly rooted in the concrete world of espionage, a dedicated Cold Warrior who helped win the Kulturkampf be-tween East and West, a crusading imperial hero from a bygone era, a “sexist, misogynist dino-saur”, and an empty vessel merely destined to be branded and franchised in the pursuit of ever greater profit. He is also immortal and contemporary throughout – none of the books or films are set in the past. While Bond is at first glance a quintessentially British creation, his Cold War adventures have established a genuinely transnational legacy. The Bondian Cold War is a complex, fictionalized, and monetized refraction of the historical era it spanned. This talk will concentrate on the reception of James Bond in the former East. As far as the Iron Curtain went, Bond was more than a mere spy: he was a way of life, whose reputation extended even to countries where censorship rarely, if ever, let him appear on screen. Bond’s presence was felt in the East not because his films aired there, but because significant efforts were expended to keep him out of the bloc’s borders and to compensate for his non-presence, what Czech scholar Petr Bílek coined the “domestication and ideological conversion” of the “James Bond narrative.” I will explore the way in which Bond helped shape both an alternative to Bond culture and a retroactive Cold War memory after 1989.